Demon Knight

  Demon Knight

  Blake Rossi Series Book 1

  Written by Sharon M. White

  Copyright © 2019 by ScareStreet.com

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  See you in the shadows,

  Sharon M. White

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

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  Chapter 1

  The sky was low and dark, roiling with an imminent storm. The drizzling rain was just heavy enough to have to use the wipers. The drizzle deepened Blake’s feeling of depression, as his ‘76 Malibu Station wagon shuddered to a stop in front of the too-happy little apartment building. At first, the building’s chipper, happy exterior, and bright interior hadn’t bothered him much. It had seemed a nice place to recover from the recent blow dealt to him by the Church.

  After the first month, Blake had come to dislike the building. His apartment was even less appealing with its big windows and small space; it was always too bright inside and he had taken to hooking blankets over some of the windows to dim it down. It seemed to him that the weather had been dreary for most of the last three months.

  That was fitting.

  His mood hadn’t improved during that time, either.

  Pulling the box of groceries across the backseat, Blake shivered as the cold rain found its way down the back of his neck. He carefully picked up the liquor store bag and set it atop the groceries. Sighing, he trudged through the opening in the white picket fence he had come to think of as ‘stupid’ and up to the door of his apartment. Inside, he paused only long enough to bend and snatch the scant amount of mail from the floor. Adding it to his box, he continued to the kitchen.

  Silence greeted him. It seemed to wrap him in a shroud. Being a former priest, Blake was used to it. His quarters in the old church had been quiet; his old house near the church had been ensconced in a crypt-like silence, and his residence at the Vatican when he visited were the same.

  But the silence that had descended upon him three months ago was different. It was unnatural and sometimes paranoia-inducing, making him feel as if he weren’t completely alone.

  With all the contents of his box unloaded on the tabletop, Blake snorted laughter; not of amusement, but a kind of disgusted disbelief. The liquor store purchases outnumbered the grocery store’s. Opening a pack of cigarettes, he lit one and then opened a bottle of Jack Daniels, pouring a tumbler half full before reaching for the mail. There was a light blue envelope in the middle of the stack. Pulling it out, Blake sighed at the letter he knew was from the landlady—she always used custom-made baby blue envelopes and matching stationery for all communications with tenants.

  Blake didn’t need to open it to know what the letter was about; he was behind on the current month’s rent. His savings were nearly gone, and since he’d been excommunicated—wrongly, in his opinion and in his heart—he could no longer keep up with the payments.

  He carried the letter to the small, overly bright living room and flopped onto the couch with his whiskey. Chugging down the remainder of the liquid, Blake turned his attention to the envelope. The landlady’s scrawling, looping handwriting stretched across the front. He tore open the top and withdrew the light blue paper. Thankfully, Ms. Creedy had used a computer to print out the communique, or he would never have been able to decipher her handwriting.

  Dear Father Rossi,

  I understand and sympathize with the recent run of bad luck you have had. However, I cannot let your past-due rent go unaddressed, as this would be unfair to the other tenants. I am willing to accommodate you for another thirty days, hopefully giving you time to attend to your financial issues. This is a courtesy in respect for your past efforts and work in the Church. Thirty (30) days after the date of this letter, I expect you will pay this month’s rent and next month’s rent. If for some reason you cannot, I will have to ask you to vacate the apartment, so some other deserving tenant can have the opportunity to rent it. I hate to even think of doing this, but I have to have income from every unit in a timely manner to successfully continue running my business.

  Thank you in advance for your efforts in rectifying this matter quickly.

  Best Regards,

  Ms. Marylin Creedy

  Blake’s knee-jerk reaction was to wad up the letter and toss it into the trash. Containing his temper had become a problem lately. He laid the letter on the couch beside him and eyed it as if it were the most unbelievable piece of communication he’d ever had.

  Ms. Creedy didn’t know the whole story of his ‘recent run of bad luck,’ as she’d dubbed it. It had been much more than that. Calling it that was insulting.

  The Church had anointed Blake their Chief Exorcist. Not a title he had sought. In fact, it was a title he never knew existed within the Church.

  For twenty years, he had been known only as Father Rossi to his flock and others in the community. As Father Rossi, he performed house blessings, and investigated homes of parishioners who thought they were being haunted by ghosts or oppressed by demons. He even did low-level ceremonies, which often cured the faithful of these maladies. Whether the sickness was only in their minds, or they were genuine oppression situations, the ceremonies worked. Thus, Father Rossi came to be known as a true exorcist among the masses.

  There were a handful of cases in all that time that Blake thought of as legitimate demonic possessions. Those cases had all been clumped together within a two-year period that he didn’t dwell on very much. In Blake’s opinion, dwelling on those cases was a bad idea. He risked summoning the powers he had banished. It also caused him to doubt his own faith and question the Church’s teachings on such issues. With each new case, his faith was tested a bit more. He never spoke to anyone about his crisis of belief, but he did take up drinking, sometimes heavily, to get through it.

  The powers that be within the Vatican had all but bullied him into taking the position, stating that it was a great honor and was to be kept secret—the public didn’t need to know about the Vatican’s private affairs. And thus began a chain of command that Blake couldn’t ignore. His movements within the Church, and outside, were monitored much more closely than before. There were quarterly meetings to ensure that Blake’s resolve to remain in office hadn’t wavered. Blake suspected that these meetings were also held to ascertain whether he was living a celibate and sober lifestyle, too.

  At the time, he had little trouble keeping up at least the appearance of it.

  The Church sent other, lower-level exorcists and trainees to investigate the complaints and concerns of those in Blake’s congregation—he wasn’t allowed to interject himself into the investigations. They feared it would bias the findings if he knew the afflicted persons. Though he strongly disagreed, the Church wouldn’t relent. He had to be satisfied that they would contact him personally if there were legitimate cases for him to attend to.

  It was one such case that had changed everything.

  The Vatican had summoned him to Rome for a private meeting. They shared with him the files of one little boy in southern Texas whom they believed was in dire need of an exorcism. Though he had been trained in exorcisms, Blake argued that it was silly; no one needed an exorcism in the twenty-first century. No matter what argument he gave, the Church shot it down and, in the end, Blake was on his way to Texas.

  Indeed, the boy seemed possessed. When the demon spoke through the child, directly to Blake, he became a believer and earnestly performed the required rituals. Stalled for a week on his request for another priest to assist him, Blake pushed on. By the eighth day, both he and the boy were exhausted. Just as the exorcism seemed to be taking effect, the boy’s body gave out.

  Crushed by the death of an innocent child, Blake returned to the Vatican to give his official report, but was greeted with hostility. News of the death had spread like wildfire and the Vatican was in the hot seat. The public needed someone to blame for the outrage and Blake was thrown under the bus. To lessen the public outcry, he was formally excommunicated. He was given the opportunity to confess his sin and repent.

  But he had refused. He had committed no sin.

  The boy still haunted Blake’s dreams, tainted his decisions, and made him weak with unimaginable regret. Fo
r Ms. Creedy to call that a ‘run of bad luck’ made him stormy and angry. She didn’t know. She couldn’t even come close to understanding what he was going through.

  That was his go-to mantra for the rest of the afternoon. He wouldn’t allow himself to confront her. He didn’t want to have to try and explain the situation to the old woman.

  Dusk was an undefined thing that happened without Blake’s notice. Inside his apartment, he was in his own sort of dusk. The whiskey had fogged his mind and slowed his reactions, bringing a false sense of peace to his troubled soul. Slowly, he made his way to his bed around nine. It was early, but he wanted to sleep off the copious amount of booze before his morning interview at the local wood factory.

  Never before had he held a regular job outside the Church. It made him unusually anxious that it had become a necessity. He’d been serving the Church and its community since he was fifteen—he didn’t know how to do anything else.

  Falling asleep was no problem that night. The booze carried him off to that warm, dark landscape devoid of worry, where there was no past and no future.

  It wasn’t long before his peace was invaded.

  Opening his eyes in total darkness, Blake had the sensation of gently rolling and knew that the liquor was still at work. Straining through the pitch darkness, he saw movement and was startled. Gasping, he sat up straight. His senses heightened. There was a light, foul odor in the room.

  “No. No. Go away, Timmy. Please, I’m sorry. Leave me in peace.”

  He hated the way his voice cracked and whined in the darkness. He hated that Timmy still visited him almost every night since the end of the exorcism. No one mourned the boy more outside his family than Blake Rossi.

  The boy’s childish, high voice seemed to answer from all around instead of from a solid, traceable source. “Why’d you kill me, Father? It hurt so bad, and you wouldn’t stop.”

  Sobbing, Blake pushed his back harder into the headboard. He desperately wanted to turn on the bedside lamp but could imagine all too clearly that small, decaying hand closing over his if he dared reach for the switch.

  “I’m sorry, Timmy. Have I not suffered enough? Leave me in peace, boy. Go rest in the bosom of our Lord and leave this place!” He made the sign of the cross in the general direction of where he’d seen the movement earlier and began reciting the Rosary with his eyes squeezed tightly shut.

  A scream emanated from the foot of his bed, at first ear-piercing, and then dwindling in volume until it disappeared. Only then did Blake dare to open his eyes.

  The demon on his bed sat weightlessly and in total silence, staring at him. It had taken the form of an old man with a long beard. His back was slightly bent, and his white hair was long and unkempt. The ethereal light surrounding the evil spirit cast an amber glow over the room in which Blake saw wispy, smoky tendrils moving about. The demon grinned, its black, oily eyes twinkling with ill intent.

  Forcing words, Blake said, “In the name of—”

  The demon laughed and flapped a dismissive hand at Blake’s face. The voice was low, gravelly, and came straight from its source unlike the boy’s. “Drop it, bible-boy. All that’s useless against me. Failure of your magnitude is rare, but that you just keep flapping at it like a dying bird is endearing.” It laughed again.

  “Leave. I have no use of unclean spirits.” Blake felt his fear giving way to righteous anger.

  The demon stood. It bent his head to keep from hitting the ceiling. “As soon as I have what I came for, altar-boy.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Your blood,” the demon screamed, lunging toward him.

  Shielding his face, Blake felt the sudden weight of the demon as it landed on his chest and wrapped its clawed fingers around his neck. Grabbing at the thing was fruitless; he came up with handfuls of air. The claws sank into Blake’s throat, and he screamed in pain. Blood gurgled up and out of his mouth and the holes in his throat.

  The alarm clock blared beside Blake’s head and he shot forward, grabbing for it, whacking his head on the corner of the nightstand. The clock fell to the floor, smashing into pieces. Holding his head, Blake sat up and put his feet on the floor, breathing a sigh of relief that there were no bloody holes in his throat.

  It had only been a dream.

  Again.

  The demon, however, was no dream. He was very real. And his torments were wearing on Blake’s mind, eating away more of his sleep, stripping him of his vitality a little more each day.

  Pulling the St. Anastasia pendant up, he eyed the necklace his mother had given him many years before. St. Anastasia was the patron saint of exorcists; she also helped heal people who had been poisoned. His mother had given it to him in the hopes that he would not poison himself with drugs and alcohol. It never helped her, he thought as he turned the heavy pendant over in his hand. Patron saint of exorcists doesn’t seem to be Anastasia’s department, either.

  Blake chastised himself for his gloomy thoughts and rubbed his eyes in an attempt to clear away the remaining fog of sleep.

  He made his way to the bathroom, dragging his legs, the memory of the dream weighing him down. In the mirror, he saw a thin man bordering on gaunt. His once black hair had gone salt-and-pepper and was in need of a trim. The graying stubble on his cheeks gave him a grizzled look that he didn’t like, and the dark circles highlighted the redness in his eyes.

  I need to stop with the drinking, and eat better, he thought as he brushed his teeth and stared at the reflection he barely recognized. He had never been a big man, but now he looked sickly instead of just thin.

  Downing three aspirin, Blake headed out for the interview, hoping for good news, so he could dig his way out of the pit of despair before it was too late. Manual labor would be good for him.

  ***

  Two weeks later, and with a total of three failed interviews under his belt, Blake finished off a bottle of whiskey in place of his forgone dinner. He was certain that replacing food with alcohol was not good, and it probably wasn’t helping his nightmares, his inability to get a good night’s sleep, or the near-constant pain in his head. It wasn’t one of the headaches that he had always been plagued with; it was a constant, dull throb, like the lingering ghost of a headache, waiting to be resurrected.

  But drink, he did.

  Wallow in his despair, he did even more.

  At the end of his given thirty days, a sharp knock sounded at his door soon after sunrise. Not yet far into his bottle of whiskey, Blake raked his fingers through his sleep-tousled hair and breathed into his cupped hand to check his breath. Satisfied that he didn’t smell like a brewery, he answered the door.

  Ms. Creedy stood there in her tidy suit, a small, neutral smile on her face. Her eyes were magnified through the lenses of her large glasses.

  “Good morning, Father Rossi. I hope I’ve not disturbed your sleep.” She stuck out her hand in greeting.

  Overlooking the jibe at his appearance, Blake shook her hand. “No. Not at all. Come in, Ms. Creedy.” He stood aside for her to enter.

  “No thanks, Father. I have other business to attend to today. I just wanted to stop by and ask about the matter of your past due rent. Have you had any luck with it?”

  Looking guiltily at the floor between them, he shook his head. “No. I’m sorry, Ms. Creedy. Thank you for your patience, but I still can’t land a job. It seems that a life in the Church hasn’t quite bestowed the required skills on me for anything else.”

  Ms. Creedy adjusted her big glasses and then clasped her hands in front of her stomach. “Well, Father Rossi, I’m very sorry to do this …”

  Holding out a stalling hand, Blake shook his head. “Not at all, Ms. Creedy. I totally understand. I have no problem with it. I’ll be out by tomorrow, no argument. And, as soon as I have a job, I promise I’ll pay you what I owe you.”

  She smiled wanly. “I wish you the very best, Father Rossi. Thank you for not making this an ugly affair. I wish it could have been different.” She shook his hand in parting.

  Closing the door, he sighed and leaned against it, glad that it was over. At least the dread of losing the place wouldn’t be hanging over him.